Beat: Android Music Player With Floating Controls, Dropbox, Google Drive Streaming & More

Being a die hard music fan, I’ve tried a ton of music players on my smartphone. When I got my first Android phone, I immediately downloaded Winamp for the platform and enjoyed its interface as well as various features that made it a great choice. But that didn’t stop me from exploring more options in Play Store, and recently when I came across Beat, I couldn’t help trying it out. It’s a fantastic music player that lets you listen to songs that are saved locally, or placed on your Dropbox or Google Drive. Besides that, it has many great features such a powerful software equalizer and floating controls to navigate the player from anywhere in Android.

The best way to explore all that Beat offers is to just dive in. When you launch the app, you’re presented with a rather dark screen that lets you navigate to USB storage, Cloud and Webradio sections. Webradio is yet to be implemented but the other two features work as they should. The best thing about Beat is its ability to fetch music from the cloud. If you’re a Dropbox or Google Drive user, you’re in luck because Beat supports both of them.

Even if your music is stored locally, there won’t be a problem because Beats can play it just as fine. When you navigate to the USB section for the first time, you need to specify the folder where your music files are located, and you’ll be all set. Beats automatically presents the tracks list for you and you can tap your desired song to instantly play it. The app also supports cover art display for your albums.

The integrated software equalizer is also one of the best bit of this app that can help you fine-tune the audio output of the current track. It carries many presets such as Rock, Pop, Classic, Dance etc. out of the box, and also lets you configure your own.

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You can swipe left or right on the home screen to reveal more options in overlaid menus. Swiping in from the left lets you to navigate between the music source, recently played or added songs, playlists, artists, and albums. Likewise, swiping from the right gives you access to more options such as toggles for Equalizer and Visualizer, as well as controls for changing cover size, list style, action bar color and more. You can also toggle the app’s Floating Controls feature that I mentioned in the beginning.

Floating Controls enable controlling music playback anywhere on Android, within other apps, games, full screen video etc. When enabled, it drops a floating icon on your screen that you can place anywhere. Taping this always visible icon expands the controls, and tapping again collapses them back. The controls include buttons for next, previous tracks, and play/pause.

To sum it up, if you’re looking for a feature-rich music player for Android that offers playback support from Dropbox and Google Drive, and can be controlled from anywhere no matter where in the OS you are and what app you’re running, you cannot go wrong with Beat.